Failing your Surprise Baby Check

So… my wife and I went to a routine 36 week midwife appointment on Wednesday around two thirty.  

By 7:15, she’d had an emergency c-section and our daughter Morrigan was born a month early.  In between we rode in an ambulance and my wife was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia (pretty severe case in fact).  

Luckily, they are both well (though my wife’s BP is still high and they are keeping her in the hospital).  

It certainly wasn’t how we planned to spend the day and has caught us very unprepared for…well just about everything!  

Damn those pesky 1’s! 

So it seems, for awhile, I’ll be trading dungeons, orcs, and talking swords for nappies, baby-grows and travel systems.

I’ll be back, but don’t be surprised if I run dark for awhile.  I’ve got to make sure our future gamer is well looked after until I can get some dice in her hands!

Map of the (Real) World

I saw this circulating around the internets.  It is an atlas with the etymological roots of names of real world places.  I love how evocative the names are.  You could easily scale this up and run a campaign or set a novel in our real world with these names and no one would ever know!

 

‘Steps of the Black One’.  ‘Island of Happiness’.  ‘Island of the Monkey God’.  ‘The Hidden Goddess’.

Tell me that doesn’t fit into any fantasy setting?

Sundered Empires Session Report 43-The City of Whispers

Read the previous play report

Fragments of Kaenan-Tal’s journal, detailing the party’s plans to free an angel from its imprisonment and to secure the ring it wears to help them return home.

[House Rules]Monster Templates-OSR Style

One of the things I loved about later editions of the game is the ideas of templates.  It allowed you to come up with all sorts of strange and interesting ways to alter a monster without needing to create something from whole cloth.  I’ve mulled the idea over and come up with a quick way to modify existing monsters to make them a bit more special and potentially dangerous without having to create new ones each time.

Sundered Empires Session Report 42-Archers Earn Their Keep

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More from the pen of Klangor, as the party heads off to kill the dragon…

[House Rules]New Spells

I wrote these spells and the accompanying spells and items as a extrapolation from Ogre’s Strength.  Their effects, if built into other spells via the spell builder would cost the same as ‘The Strength of an Ogre’ as their base.

Sundered Empires Session Report 41-Dragonslayers

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More from the pen of Klangor, as the party seeks to honor the request of their hosts, and hunt for a tool to help them kill a dragon…

[House Rules]Divine Elves Part 5: Elven Enchanter

A recent thread on RPG.Net had an awesome premise.  What if you removed Clerics from OD&D and gave their magic to elves?

I thought the idea had merit.  The more I rolled it around in my head, the more I liked it.  Even if you left Clerics in, the spell creation and class creation rules in ACKS gave a perfect opportunity to build a ‘better elf’… or at least a different one.

So I did…see the previous post about the race build.  See the previous altered Spellblade Class.  And here is the post about Nightblades. And another about Courtiers.

In this post I’m going to rebuild the Elven Enchanter class as a divine caster.  Their spell list focuses on illusion, enchantment, and transformative magic.

All Quiet on the Sundered Front

Well, I’ve been even more quiet than usual the last few days.  That is because my wife and I are in the process of moving to a new house!  We are actually moving in today and tomorrow, but I imagine the unpacking will go on for weeks and I will be losing internet tomorrow until Tuesday.  

So, it might be awhile before I can post a new update.  The campaign is still going strong.  I have many more session reports written and ‘in the can’ as it were.  I also have a few more Divine Elf classes to post before I ratchet things up and post a ‘Full Tolkien’ style elf race/class based on the Divine template. All this divine elf stuff has started me thinking about a new setting with new takes on B/X races and classes, as well as twisting the tropes (no human casters, divine elves, dwarven arcanists, oh my!) to something different.  

So, I hope you’ll stay tuned after this short break. 

Sundered Empires Session Report 40-Wonders of the Valanorn

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Fragments of Kaenan-Tal’s journal…as discovered many centuries later.  It was an interesting experiment by the player to change up how he recorded the events of the session.  This was one of those roleplaying heavy sessions where no one rolled any dice but instead they spent a lot of time… frolicking.